Bruce

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The tour rumbled through sixteen cities in the next four months, playing multiple shows in most of them (including six nights in Philadelphia, five in Boston, and four in Los Angeles) until taking a break from the end of November until the end of February 2000. Then they launched another four-month run, climaxing in ten sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden. And as Bruce swooned over how far the individual band members’ musicianship had come in ten years, the years had also worked a treat in the musicians’ abilities to withstand, and even enjoy, the quirks they each brought into the group. “The respect for one another and ability to appreciate the uniqueness of each player was better than it ever was,” says Tallent. “I’d look around the stage and be in awe. Everyone had grown up, everyone was playing great, everyone was a complete professional.”

  As the tour completed its first year and kept rolling, Bruce began coming in to the afternoon sound check with new songs to work through. “American Skin,” sometimes known as “41 Shots,” turned up first at the preshow warmup at the Raleigh Arena in North Carolina, went through one rough runthrough, then vanished until April 29, when Bruce reintroduced it along with “Further On (Up the Road),” a raw-throated highway song he’d worked out that winter. “Another Thin Line” and “Code of Silence,” written with Joe Grushecky, came next. Bruce held them back until they got to the tour’s penultimate stop in Atlanta in early June. On the stand’s second night, June 4, they opened the show with “Further On,” shifted back to more familiar terrain for the next five songs, and then without introduction launched into the quiet but insistent keyboard opening to the song now called “American Skin (41 Shots).”

  It started in darkness, with the frontline players—Clemons, Lofgren, Bruce, Van Zandt, and Patti—standing still with feet planted, staring out into the hall. When the descending chord sequence cycled back to its beginning, Clemons leaned forward. “Forty-one shots,” he sang. Lofgren repeated the words, followed by Van Zandt and Patti. When Bruce stepped forward, they sang it together four times, leading into an opening verse that traced the outlines of a shooting. The bullets in the air, the victim bleeding on the floor, someone kneeling above the body, praying he’ll survive. The lyrics in the chorus made clear which shooting Bruce had in mind.

  Is it a gun? Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? / This is your life . . .

  Anyone familiar with contemporary New York controversies knew what was on Bruce’s mind. In early February 1999 four New York Police Department officers, all dressed in plain clothes and searching for a rapist said to be wandering the Bronx, called out to a twenty-two-year-old African immigrant named Amadou Diallo as he stepped into the doorway of his apartment building. A recent immigrant still learning the nation’s language, Diallo responded to the officers’ shouts as he’d been trained to do in Guinea, by reaching into his pocket for his identification cards. One or more of the officers mistook the wallet for a gun, and all four opened fire with their automatic pistols. In a split second, they got off forty-one rounds. Nineteen of the bullets hit Diallo, wounding him mortally.

  The outrage began immediately. Diallo, an observant Muslim, possessed neither a gun nor a criminal record. Meanwhile, the police officers who had killed him had colorful pasts. All members of the NYPD’s aggressive Street Crimes Unit, three had already been involved in shootings while on duty,5 and one of them was still being investigated for his role in a fatal shooting. In the wake of other police shootings, and pretty much exactly at the point where many citizens had lost their enthusiasm for Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to hose street crime, civil disobedience, and decadence in general into the East River, a broad consortium of neighborhood and political activists flew into action. Protests began in New York and then spread to Washington, DC, where the US Attorneys’ Office launched a federal investigation of the Diallo shooting. At the same time, voices from the Giuliani administration and the police force (and the officers’ union representatives) shot back vehemently.

  Working against this backdrop, Bruce wrote “American Skin.” The song’s first verse describes the Diallo shooting from the perspective of a police officer praying for the innocent man’s life and recalling the stab of panic that caused him to mistake the leather wallet for a deadly weapon. The next verse visits a mother reminding her young son how to walk the streets so the police won’t mistake him for a threat: “. . . never, ever run away / And promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.” If there’s an indictment in the song, it’s aimed at the racial, social, and political divisions that feed into the fear, confusion, and violence that overwhelms the forces of humanity and community. The most striking line in its chorus—“You can get killed just for living / In your American skin”—addresses society in all its racial, political, and class-based divisions. At which point the forty-one shots and the Diallo case recede into a metaphor for the social disconnection that spawns so much of the world’s violence. No one is spared, including the song’s author. “Got my boots caked in this mud,” Bruce sings. “We’re baptized in these waters / And in each other’s blood.”

  Premiered with no advance notice and no immediate follow-through from Landau Management (such as a statement of purpose or a printed set of lyrics), word of Bruce’s fiery new song moved onto the newswires (“New Springsteen Song Laments Bronx Shooting”), to the nascent Internet sites and chat boards, where off-the-cuff analyses, criticisms, and defenses of the song soon blew up into a mainstream media storm. Less than four days after the song’s debut, Microsoft’s online journal, Slate, published a blog entry by political writer Timothy Noah, proposing that Bruce had written the song intending to help Hillary Clinton defeat Rudy Giuliani in the 2000 US Senate race. That Giuliani had withdrawn from the race in mid-May struck Noah as a minor point, since he guessed (correctly, as it turns out) that Bruce had written the song months earlier. If Noah’s speculation about Bruce’s Hillarymania was a bit far-fetched,6 he did grasp one important fact: with the exception of the Three Mile Island–inspired “Roulette” from 1979, “American Skin” was the first Springsteen song to refer to specific events still playing out in the headlines. In this, Bruce crossed a bridge he’d avoided in the twenty years since he began to explore the larger socioeconomic factors that control the fates of the working class and the poor. That he tended to pursue larger issues through character-driven stories made it easy to avoid specific controversies. “When you deal with politics and pop music, they’re always going to be thrown together, and they’re always going to be uncomfortable bedfellows,” Bruce says. “Popular music is always going to be something people take home, don’t read the instructions, and just use. That’s the way it is; that’s okay.” He shrugs. “Maybe you should have to read the instructions.”

  The president of the NYPD’s union, Patrick Lynch, followed one bombast with another, by calling for officers to not work security at any of the Madison Square Garden shows, even if they needed the extra money. “I consider it an outrage that [Springsteen] would be trying to fatten his wallet by reopening the wounds of this tragic case,” Lynch said. Both Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner, Howard Safir, also released statements criticizing Bruce and “American Skin,” with Giuliani complaining about the “people trying to create the impression that the police officers are guilty,” while Safir asserted that the city’s officers had a right to dislike Bruce Springsteen if they so chose. “I personally don’t particularly care for [his] music or his songs,” Safir added. Never mind that “American Skin” made no such assertion about the police, just as no one had ordered NYPD officers to purchase Bruce Springsteen albums. But neither Giuliani nor Safir could hold a roman candle to Bob Lucente, leader of the New York chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, who dismissed Bruce as a “floating fag” and a “dirtbag” for criticizing the NYPD.7

  “I think Stevie ran in with a newspaper—Steve is always the bearer of news—saying, ‘Hey man, did you see this? Look at what they’re calling you on the front page!’” Bruce says. Van Zandt
handed him the day’s New York Post, its front page filled with a headline, “10th Avenue Cop-Out,” about the controversy. “I said, ‘What?’ It was kind of, ‘Wait a minute! This guy hasn’t even heard this song!’” That “American Skin” didn’t criticize the NYPD or anyone in the force didn’t matter.

  When Bruce and company rolled into Madison Square Garden on June 12 to start their two-and-a-half-week residency, Bruce opened the show by premiering another song, “Code of Silence,” that seemed to throw down another gauntlet. For while the lyrics never specify if the conflict at hand looms between lovers, family members, or civic institutions, controversy enthusiasts couldn’t help but interpret it as another layer of protest or contempt. “American Skin” found a spot with the show’s heaviest songs at the heart of the set, and with Diallo’s family looking on (when they called Landau’s office, Bruce made sure they got preferential treatment), the song became the gravitational center of the performance, a pivot between the gloom of “Point Blank” and the resolute optimism of “The Promised Land.” The crowd reaction sounded more like acclaim than disapproval, although as the New York Times’ Jon Pareles wrote, it would have been difficult to hear the difference between boos and the perpetual rain of “Bruuuuuce!” cheers called out by fans. At least one observer shared his thoughts by planting himself at the foot of the stage with both middle fingers extended toward the man at the center microphone.

  Pareles published his review of “American Skin” and the rest of the first Madison Square Garden show two days later, including the song’s full lyrics. Meanwhile, on the day’s editorial pages, a piece by the Times’ libertarian columnist John Tierney attacked the song, and Bruce, repeating the inaccurate charge that the song was a slam against New York’s police. To establish his contempt, Tierney began by ridiculing the repetition of the words “Forty-one shots” at the start of the song (“he is firmly on record against the extra bullets”). Next, he unspooled the traitor-to-his-class argument (“Springsteen . . . doesn’t have to hitchhike on Route 9 anymore”) on the way to asserting that the onetime spokesman for the American working class had become a “limousine liberal” fixated on “conventional liberal causes, like homelessness and AIDS.” While it was surprising to think that Tierney considered the destitute and certain terminally ill people as abstract symbols in political clichés, the writer says he figured that the anti-NYPD outcry spurred by protesters was doing exactly that to Diallo. “To me, the [song’s] emphasis on the forty-one shots did play to the antipolice mob mentality that existed at the time,” Tierney writes in an e-mail. “That was the rallying cry of those trying to exploit the tragedy for their own political reasons. And Springsteen’s choice of those lyrics . . . struck me as another example of Springsteen pleasing the Central Park West audience instead of the Asbury Park one.”

  Tierney, who carries no brief for authoritarian police or mayors, is welcome to his opinions on the herding instincts of New York liberals. But his disquisition on “American Skin” takes enough liberties with Bruce’s lyrical intent to make his analysis seem questionable, while his assertions that Bruce’s wealth somehow disqualified him from publicly empathizing with the less powerful seemed more like a political tactic than anything else. What bothered Bruce about it, along with the bitter protests of Giuliani, Safir, and others, was how detached from reality they were.

  “That’s what we ran into: willful distortion,” he says. “You don’t want to be naive and say it’s shocking, because it’s not shocking. I understand how the world works. But still, I don’t get it. It’s not that somebody got the story wrong. It’s the willful distortion of what you’re trying to say. That was the problem I had, not just with ‘American Skin,’ but you can take that all the way back to Reagan and ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ The willful distortion of what you’re trying to say.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE COUNTRY WE CARRY IN OUR HEARTS IS WAITING

  FOR BRUCE, THAT TUESDAY BEGAN much like it did for every other American lucky enough not to be in the buildings or on one of the doomed airplanes. He was at the kitchen table, ploughing through a bowl of cereal and berries when someone ran in and told him to turn on the TV. An airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower. The second airplane hit the south tower a few moments later. By the end of the afternoon, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had toppled the skyscrapers, smashed through a wing of the Pentagon, sent another jet hurtling into a Pennsylvania field, and sent the nation hurtling into something approaching chaos. Bruce drove to the Rumson–Sea Bright Bridge, which crosses the Shrewsbury River near the edge of the ocean, and gazed at the Manhattan skyline in the northern distance. “It all didn’t really hit home ’til I took a ride across the bridge, and there was nothing where the towers used to be,” he told writer Robert Hilburn.

  Taking another look from the Sea Bright beach a few days later, Bruce was just pulling out of a parking space when a man cruising by unrolled his window. “We need you, man!” he called.

  “I knew what he was talking about,” Bruce said to NBC’s Matt Lauer a year later. “I think one of the things folks wanted to see in those early days was . . . the faces of people who were familiar to them, and people who mattered to them . . . We’ve worked hard for my music to play a very central and . . . purposeful place in my audience’s life. [So] it was a small wake-up call.”

  When the leaders of the nation’s four major television networks joined forces with director Joel Gallen and actor George Clooney to plan a national telethon to aid the families of the attack’s victims, Jon Landau got a call from Jimmy Iovine, the engineer-turned-industry powerhouse,1 then helping to recruit music acts. When Landau mentioned that Bruce already had a song on hand that addressed the grief and determination they hoped to tap, Gallen gave him the opening slot on the telecast that would be viewed on all four American networks and the majority of major US cable channels, along with cable outlets from all over the world.

  The September 21 broadcast began with a live glimpse of New York Harbor, a tugboat moving with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the emptiness marking the missing towers in the rear. The image darkened and then faded up on the candle-bedecked soundstage where Bruce stood, guitar in hand, harmonica rack around his neck, and a seven-member chorale2 standing behind. There was no spoken introduction, no name written across the bottom of the screen. Bruce strummed a chord progression, issued a quick dedication—“This is a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters”—and then leaned into the opening verse of “My City of Ruins,” a melancholy gospel-style ballad he’d written a year earlier, thinking about the fall of Asbury Park. But in the days after the attacks on New York City, when the nation felt as bereft as the forsaken town Bruce describes, where the church pews are as empty as the storefronts, its residents as lost as their own sense of hope. When the song’s narrator speaks to a missing lover, his description of the emptiness in their bed sounded far too familiar to those left to mourn a loved one. “Tell me how to begin again,” he sang. “My city’s in ruins.”

  But as with the gospel and (not coincidentally) so many of his own songs, the darkest moments of night foreshadow the dawn. “Now, with these hands, with these hands, with these hands . . .” The choir joined in softly and then with growing urgency as Bruce’s voice and guitar gained power. Then he lifted his voice even higher, imploring the skies for some sign of hope.

  I pray for the strength, Lord; I pray for the faith, Lord; We pray for the lost, Lord; We pray for the strength, Lord . . .

  The singers swayed to the music, their raised hands locked together, their voices expressing the grief in the air and the most American of ideals: that no tragedy can undo a person, or a community, determined to climb back to their feet, roll up their sleeves, and rebuild. And with that vision, proffered in a rare moment of posttraumatic national solidarity, Bruce’s voice set the tone for the evening and, for many viewers, nodded toward the path from devastation to redemption.

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  Bruce’s journey from rock star to cultural symbol had been increasingly vivid since the start of the reunion tour. On the posters promoting the tour-ending Madison Square Garden concerts, and then on the cover of the Live in New York City CD drawn from the final two shows (released in 2001), the central image captures a silhouette of Bruce and Clarence Clemons onstage: Bruce holding his Fender Telecaster; Clemons, his saxophone. Something about the red sky behind them lends an industrial look; rock ’n’ roll machinery powered by molten hearts. Bruce’s name marches across the top, with the E Street Band just below, more for design than informational purposes. The cover image alone, Bruce’s wide stance, the hunch over his guitar, and Clemons’s shoulders thrown back, had become a recognized symbol. For a certain kind of barroom-sprouted rock ’n’ roll, to be sure. But also for a set of ideas and beliefs. You didn’t have to like his music to respect Bruce’s commitment to his craft or admire the egalitarian ideals he had both pursued and written songs about for so many years. That so many of those songs described, celebrated, or mourned the absence of basic American values gave Bruce another kind of gravitas. More than any other contemporary artist, he had made himself synonymous with the cause of the common man; a fellow traveler on the same path trod by Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Pete Seeger.

  Still, Bruce had resisted the lure of explicit partisanship. Apart from occasional onstage comments (for instance, telling his Tempe, Arizona, audience on November 5, 1980, that the election of Ronald Reagan the previous night struck him as “pretty frightening”) and his obvious dismay at Reagan’s 1984 attempt to claim spiritual kinship, his public activism during that decade was limited largely to supporting the causes of Vietnam veterans and community food banks. But while Bruce’s role in Steve Van Zandt’s “Sun City” showed his willingness to take on hotly controversial issues, he’d downplayed partisanship in favor of a populist, vaguely anticorporate, proworker message that could come as easily from political conservatives with an ear for the common man. “I think Bruce was presenting and inhabiting an alternate patriotic vein than the one that was dominant in the country at the time,” says Eric Alterman, a political analyst and author of many books and articles for the Nation, MSNBC, and the Jewish Daily Forward, among others. “He became sort of the president of an imaginary America—the other America, so the rest of the world could admire the country the way they wanted to, without having to accept the fact that Reagan or George Bush spoke for America.”